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Simon Lester

Simon Lester

Co-founder of WorldTradeLaw.net and China Trade Monitor. Non-resident fellow at the Baker Institute.

http://simonlester.com

The Substance of Investment Treaties

It has always seemed to me there is insufficient study of the substance of investment treaties, i.e., what do the obligations mean, what is their impact, etc. I often hear that the principles are no different from what is found in domestic law, but that doesn't satisy

Implementing the Seal Products Ruling

The parties have agreed to an implementation deadline of October 18, 2015. This is from the Canada-EU agreement: We wish to inform you that, with reference to our previous communication from 24 July 2014 and pursuant to Article 21.3(b) of the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing

History of TBT Article 2.2

Some of you may have seen this short article I wrote for the JIEL, which looks at the GATT negotiating history of the precursor provisions to TBT Agreement Articles 2.1 and 2.2 (there's a little more technical detail in the piece here), in the period 1969

Polling on ICSID

A little while back, I wondered about public opinion on investment obligations. In this regard, my friend Luke Peterson points me to some data on Americans' views of ICSID. It's such awful data, though, that I should probably just ignore it. I only highlight it to make

CETA and the Prudential Carve-Out

We talked about the "prudential exception" here, here, and here, and then just recently here. In the last link, I mentioned that I had a short article coming out arguing for revised language for this exception. But the CETA negotiators beat me to it. Here's what

Dresden Conference on Mega-Regionals

Some details on an upcoming conference on mega-regionals: On 23rd and 24th October 2014 the Research Centre for International Economic Law at the University of Dresden led by Professor Thilo Rensmann and the affiliated research project “Global TranSAXion” will be hosting a conference on “Mega-Regionals and the Future

CETA: Limits on Domestic Wine Preferences

From a Canadian news report: A trade deal between Canada and the European Union could restrict Canada’s wine sales by limiting the number of privately run outlets selling domestic products, if a leaked document turns out to be close to the finalized treaty. A German website posted the 521-

Is the Appellate Body Trying To Discourage DSU Article 11 Appeals?

I haven't crunched the numbers on this, but it certainly feels as though DSU Article 11 appeals have increased in recent years. Yet almost all of them get rejected. This seems like a strange state of affairs. Why pursue a course that is virtually certain to fail? In

CETA, ISDS, and Religious Discrimination: The Burqa Ban

In the comments of this post, we talked about the scope of the "targeted discrimination" aspects of the fair and equitable treatment obligation in the leaked CETA investment chapter. The relevant language is as follows: Article X.9: Treatment of Investors and of Covered Investments ... 2. A Party

Legal Aspects of Domestic Economic Integration: Canadian Reform Proposals

This is from a paper by some Canadian business groups on promoting internal free trade within Canada through reform of Canada's Agreement on Internal Trade: A more effective and efficient dispute resolution mechanism should include ... a domestic equivalent of investor-state dispute settlement, ... . Investor-state dispute settlement normally